MORAL DEBATES OF OUR TIMES

ABORTION

The year began in 1998 with numerous media reflections on
the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Roe vs.
Wade decision and the thirty to thirty-five million abortions that the
ruling legalized. (In fact, three years earlier in 1995, Norma McCorvey [known
as Jane Roe], the woman whose fight for the right to an abortion led to the 1973
Supreme Court decision, said that she disavowed her position and had been
baptized by the national head of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.) In
January of that year, a New York Times/CBS News telephone survey of 1,101
Americans found one- half viewing "abortion [as] the same thing as murdering a
child" and a general preference toward restricting the procedure. For instance,
when asked whether a pregnant woman should be able to get a legal abortion if
her pregnancy would force her to interrupt her career, only 25% said yes--down
from 37% in 1989. With the conclusion of this anniversary year, studies of The Alan Guttmacher Institute found
a decrease in the number of abortion providers in the United States and reported
the lowest abortion rate since 1975. (Click here for the Abortion
Law Homepage.)

American women have among the highest rates of unplanned
pregnancies and abortions of all industrialized countries. Chances are more
than 2 in 5 that
an American woman will have an abortion sometime in her lifetime. Although
the total number of abortions --1.6 million a year-- performed in the United
States and the rate of abortions among American women has remained relatively
constant, more married women are getting abortions, according to recent
surveys.

The American abortion history not only involves central moral,
religious and social values, but has also been shaped by racism, feminism, and
class dynamics. A powerful political coalition, perhaps with as many as ten
million followers, has emerged to promote antiabortion legislation. By the late
1990s there were reports of extreme antiabortionists allying
themselves with rightist militia groups. Philadelphia Surgeon Dr. Everett
Koop, the antiabortion activist who was to serve as Reagan's Surgeon General,
observed: "Nothing like it has separated our society since the days of
slavery."

Worldwide, roughly one-in-five abortions occurs in developed nations. In India and China there's a
different facet to the abortion-feminist connection: the selective-sex abortions of female fetuses. According to Prabhat Kumar
et al. ("Low male-to-female
sex ratio of children born in India," The Lancet [online Jan. 9, 2006]),
selective-sex abortions claims one-half million Indian girls each year.
Interestingly, they found the female feticides most common among the most
educated women--those who could afford the ultrasound determination of sex
tests.

Case study: "The Nuremberg Files", an
antiabortion site sued in 1999 for listing the names of physicians who perform
abortions, referred to as "baby butchers." In October 1998, the site crossed
off the name of Dr. Barnett Slepian after he was murdered in his Buffalo home
by a sniper

And to see the work that has drawn the ire of pro-life and pro-choice
folks alike, check out John J. Donahue and Steven Levitt's "The
Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime" in the May 2001 issue of The
Quarterly Journal of Economics.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

The United States executed 53 individuals in 2006,
46 percent fewer than in 1999, when the
greatest number (98) were put to death since the early 1950s. Nearly four in ten of these
executions occurred in the state of Texas (whose Dept. of Criminal Justice's "Death Row"
statistics page for some reason even details final meal
requests). Since its reinstatement in 1976, this ritual of retribution
has been administered to nearly 1100Americans. For up-to-date statistics,
history and famous trials check CBSNews.com's Capital
Punishment Interactive website.

According to Amnesty International's 2002
report, only two countries executed more people than did the United States
during the preceding year: China (1,060) and Iran (113). Together,
these countries conducted 80% of all known executions worldwide. Congress's 1993 crime bill extended the death penalty to an additional 47
Federal crimes, authorizing the death penalty for 15 Federal crimes previously
punishable by life in prison. As the Derechos Human Rights organization notes,
the ritual has been abolished de
jure or de facto by 111 nations and is still imposed
in 83 others. For one country's history of the practice, see Capital Punishment U.K.

Support for the death penalty is slipping in the United
States, from a 1994 peak of 84 percent to, according to a May 2001 Pew Center
report, 66 percent--about its level in the 1950s. This decline
corresponds with declines in homicide rates and public support.

The Georgia Execution
Tapes. Released in May 2001, these tapes contain prisoners' last
statements, sounds of the ritual procedures of putting individuals to death,
and one botched execution that had to be "reinitiated."

In early 1998,
Karla
Tucker became the 145th individual executed by Texas (click
here for the state's death row information) since the moratorium on
capital punishment was lifted in 1977. She was the first woman executed in that
state since the Civil War, despite widespread support for her cause. A telegenic
individual and a born again Christian, Ms. Tucker became known as the nicest
person on death row and her supporters included televangelist Pat Robertson and
the homicide detective who tracked her down. After her death, some speculated
that perhaps the Christian Right might soften its staunch pro-capital punishment
position. It didn't. In March 2003 Texas conducted its 300th
execution in 20 years.

Since fundamentalist Christians comprise roughly one-third
of American adults, how might such a shift in stance toward this ultimate
punishment affect their positions toward other death-related moral issues? To be
more precise, to what extent does their moral ideology integrate attitudes
toward capital punishment, abortion, and physician-assisted death
(euthanasia)?

In Protestants' minds there was at century's end no
correlation between attitudes toward capital punishment and abortion.
Beliefs about capital punishment do, however, correlate with attitudes toward
physician-assisted death--more so for fundamentalist Protestants than for their
more liberal Protestant counterparts. For
instance, those fundamentalist Protestants who favor executions are nearly half
again more
likely to favor physician-assisted death than those opposing executions. Thus it
might be predicted that any shift toward opposing capital punishment will lead
to increasing opposition in this group toward abortion and euthanasia.